Creating Research Corpora for the Computational Study of Music: the case of the CompMusic Project

Xavier Serra

Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

A fundamental concern in music information research is the use of appropriate data sets, research corpora, from which to perform the needed data processing tasks. These corpora have to be suited for the specific research problems to be addressed and the design criteria with which to create them is a research task to which not much attention has been paid. In the CompMusic project we are studying several non-western art music traditions and a major effort has been the creation of the appropriate data collections with which to study and characterise the melodic and rhythmic aspects of these traditions. In this article we go over the criteria used to create these collections and we describe the specificities of each of the collections gathered.

Bio of presenter

Xavier Serra is Associate Professor of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies and Director of the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. After a multidisciplinary academic education he obtained a PhD in Computer Music from Stanford University in 1989 with a dissertation on the spectral processing of musical sounds that is considered a key reference in the field. His research interests cover the understanding, modelling and generation of musical signals by computational means, with a balance between basic and applied research and approaches from both scientific/technological and humanistic/artistic disciplines. Dr. Serra is very active in promoting initiatives in the field of Sound and Music Computing at the local and international levels, being involved in the editorial board of a number of journals and conferences and giving lectures on current and future challenges of the field. He has recently been awarded an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council to carry out the project CompMusic aimed at promoting multicultural approaches in music computing research.